Fire Together, Wire Together

Sat, 31 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

For a long time I believed humans can function just fine without emoting. Somewhere along the way it became hard for me to do, so I decided it wasn’t important. Then someone who meant the world to me asked me for exactly that, and I realised that if I want to have a fulfilling personal life, I need to learn how to emote. As a scientist, I will always favour research-backed science to help me improve. If I could understand how emotions actually work in the brain and the body, maybe I could use that to show up better for myself and for the people I love. That’s how I found neuroplasticity.

What is neuroplasticity?

Neuroplasticity is the brain’s ability to change itself. Every time you learn something, the connections between your neurons physically change, whether you are remembering the names of your new coworkers, getting better at a video game or learning a new route home.

Neuroscientists like to sum up how it works with the phrase “neurons that fire together, wire together”. When two connected neurons keep firing at the same time, the connection between them gets stronger. The receiving neuron adds more receptors, so the same signal has a bigger effect the next time, and the pathway becomes the one your brain is most likely to use. This is called long-term potentiation. It also works the other way round, and connections that are rarely used together get weaker, which is called long-term depression (which has nothing to do with the mood).

Synaptic plasticity. A connection that is used a lot gains receptors and passes on a stronger signal, while one that is rarely used loses them.

That is the synaptic side of things. There is also a structural side, where the neurons literally change shape. They grow tiny new bumps on their branches called dendritic spines, which is where new connections form, and they can branch out more. Connections that are not used get removed altogether in a process called synaptic pruning.

Can adults still change?

Children’s brains are plastic almost by default. They go through sensitive periods where they learn just by being around something, which is why a kid can pick up a language from playing with friends while I am on day 400 of Duolingo. A lot of what we learn passively as children stays with us for life, the good and the bad.

Adults can still change, but we have to work harder for it. Adult plasticity needs alertness and focused attention to switch on, small and incremental steps rather than giant leaps, and a lot of repetition. Sleep matters too, because that is when a lot of the strengthening actually gets locked in. It is harder at 26 than it was at 6, but it is very much possible.

What does this have to do with emotions?

It turns out a lot. Emotional regulation runs on the same kind of wiring as everything else, and one of the key connections is between the amygdala, a small region that reacts quickly to threats and strong feelings, and the prefrontal cortex, the part behind your forehead that helps calm those reactions down. That connection changes with experience too. In studies on rats, chronic stress made neurons in the amygdala grow more branches while neurons in the prefrontal cortex shrank theirs, so the alarm got louder and the brakes got weaker. Three weeks after the stress ended, the prefrontal neurons had grown back, although the amygdala changes lasted longer. A 2026 study in Nature is a reminder that this two-region story is a simplification, since there is no single “regulation centre” in the brain, but the direction of the evidence is the same.

A schematic of what chronic stress did to the rat brains, not to scale. Based on Vyas et al. (2002) and Radley et al. (2005).

What surprised me most was the research on holding emotions in. Psychologist James Gross and his colleagues found that when people suppress the outward expression of their emotions, the feeling does not go away and their bodies show more stress, even though they look calm on the outside. People who habitually suppress also feel less close to others, and in one study, even the person they were talking to had a rise in blood pressure. So not emoting does not just affect me, it affects the people I love too, and the chest ache and foggy thoughts I have been feeling suddenly made a lot more sense.

Practices that actually rewire

Everyone feels things, even if they don’t emote. I might not show my stress, talk about it, or tell someone I love that I appreciate them, but the feelings are still there inside, and my chest ache was proof of that. Giving those feelings an outlet is where emotional regulation comes in, and the part that got me really excited is that it can be trained like any other skill.

What blew my mind is how fast the brain responds. In a 2026 study from the University of Illinois, college students practised steering their attention to neutral details of an upsetting scene, like the trees and the sky in a photo of a car accident, and looking at difficult situations from a different angle. After just five weeks, they felt less distressed even about hard events from their own lives, and their brain scans had actually changed, with the prefrontal cortex more connected and the regions linked to negative emotions less sensitive. Five weeks! Slowing your breath down to around six breaths a minute every day for five weeks strengthened the connection between the amygdala and the prefrontal cortex in another trial, and even practising looking at a painful situation from the outside, like a fly on the wall, changed the brain’s negative emotion patterns in just two weeks in a small study. These are early results, but they are real changes in real brains, in weeks, not years.

I have seen a small version of this in myself too. The less I use social media, the less impulsive I am all the time. And the more I have been journalling over the last few months, the more I think before speaking and the better I understand myself.

When we were young, our brains learnt whatever they could just by being around things, but as adults they need deliberate training. Some of us, for various reasons, have had certain mechanisms locked in place for a long time because that is what we learnt. But it is not too late. Neuroplasticity gives me the courage and the strength to keep going. It is hard, but no matter who you are, if you want to live a secure, happy and content life, the science says we can get there. I am 26, and science says I can do it!

“We are seeing that resilience is about flexibility. The key to resilience is not avoiding negative emotions or just simply trying to feel positive all the time; it’s more about developing the flexibility to respond to emotions in ways that fit the situation.”

Prof. Sanda Dolcos, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Biology | Sanika S. Khadkikar

Fire Together, Wire Together

What is neuroplasticity?

Can adults still change?

What does this have to do with emotions?

Practices that actually rewire